RECENT PROGRESS IN CHEMISTRY. 533 



volved found their chemical ingenuity severely taxed. Various eco- 

 nomical methods of recovering waste by-products were adopted, and 

 finally attention was turned to the " burned ore " or " pyrites-cin- 

 ders " obtained in roasting pyrites for the sulphuric acid ; this is now 

 treated for copper, silver, and, to some extent, for gold. A Spanish 

 company, owning enormous deposits of pyrites on the Rio Tinto, plan 

 to establish in France alkali- works with the intention of deriving their 

 profits solely from the residual oxide of iron and the copper. 



Forty-eight years ago alkali manufacturers might have seen a cloud 

 arising, no bigger than a man's hand, which gradually grew darker 

 and heavier, and now threatens to overwhelm the Leblanc process. 

 Dyer and Hemming patented the so-called " ammonia process " for 

 manufacturing soda in 1838 ; Schlossing and Holland attempted to. 

 carry it out practically in 1855, but it was not found profitable. The 

 credit of overcoming the practical difficulties, and placing the process 

 on an economical basis, belongs to Solvay, of Brussels, who began to 

 manufacture so-called " ammonia-soda " in 1866. Commencing with 

 the modest yield of 179 tons in that year, he increased it in ten years to 

 11,580 tons, and in 1883 about forty per cent of all the soda made on 

 the Continent was produced by the ammonia process. The success of 

 the new process has completely killed the Leblanc method in Belgium, 

 and has caused the closing of many works in England. A drawback 

 to the new process is that no hydrochloric acid is produced, yet chlo- 

 ride of lime is always in demand ; hence a high authority, Dr. Lunge, 

 thinks that in the future the two processes will, of necessity, exist side 

 by side. Mr. Rowland Hazard and others, having secured the right 

 to work under Solvay's patents, have established a manufactory at 

 Geddes, near Syracuse, New York. The estimated production of 

 these works for 1886 is thirty million kilos, and the soda obtained is 

 of great purity. It will be interesting to watch the future of this in- 

 dustry in America. 



In modern chemical literature by far the greatest amount of space 

 is occupied with researches and discoveries in organic chemistry. To 

 the non-professional reader the peculiarly technical language, abound- 

 ing in words of unusual length, is not only incomprehensible, but 

 positively forbidding. A vocabulary which contains such terms as 

 toluyldiphenyltriamidocarbinol acetate and methylorthomonohydroxy- 

 benzoate does not encourage the casual reader ; and when he learns that 

 the first-named body is the dye-stuff commonly called magenta, and 

 that the second is the innocent oil of wintergreen, surprise gives way 

 to feelings of despair. When one is gleefully informed that a dis- 

 tinguished foreigner has discovered that orthobrombenzyl bromide 

 treated with sodium yields anthracene, which, heated with nitric acid, 

 yields anthraquinone, and that anthraquinonedisulphonic acid fused 

 with potassium hydroxide furnishes dioxyanthraquinone, the lay hearer 

 can hardly be expected to become enthusiastic over the announcement, 



